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Fire destroys Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
(koreajoongangdaily.joins.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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As a sysadmin that's pretty much my worst nightmare. I really feel for those trying to pick the pieces back up again after that.
You know for a fact that the people doing the largest share of the recovery effort have nothing to do with the decision to have no backups.
...but with the way social/work hierarchies work in SK, it was probably never brought up.
A nice clean start on a fresh install.
I feel your pain, but meanwhile I'm laughing. No backups, no fire suppression system, what the fuck are these clowns doing.
Suppressing evidence? Looks like this was a deliberate oversight to later erase data.
Probably data retention safety was overruled earlier by one person.
So, I think the designed erase worked as designed .
Hanlon's razor mate. I know it's entirely possible that it's a conspiracy, but it'd entirely possible (and more likely) that it's just incompetence and lack of communication due to inefficient and lackluster processes as well as too many levels of leadership.
Pretty big conspiracy theory for a situation where incompetence doesn't seem out of the ordinary.
SysAdmins saying "We need X, we need Y", someone who signs the cheques saying "But it works fine! Why would there be a fire? We already spent so much on those UPSs"
I don’t know a lot at this time. The cool thing is this will be discussed for years , and any who follow this will know a lot more.
I’m just saying if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck it may not be a squirrel
What you described isn't "looks like a duck, quacks like a duck".
This is a fire in a government (publicly-funded) location in an industry that's often overlooked and underfunded... in a traditionally conservative country (with a Liberal leader for the last few months) that is part of a very top-down hierarchical structure. Which would suggest that the complaints of a systems administrator are likely to be ignored. And that's assuming that the systems administrator is competent, which isn't a guarantee in and of itself.
I'm seeing what looks like a duck, I'm hearing the quacks. The conspiracy theory is that it's a squirrel in a duck costume that learned how to quack so people would toss it bread.
Here we have a glass of water, it’s half full.
Did someone forget to fill it up, or did someone drink it.
Is it institutional incompetence or criminal conspiracy?
I don't think changing the analogy makes your argument stronger
I don’t have any argument, just my natural suspicion only.
But you likewise are thin on facts, your natural inclination is to see this as more a system issue.
Either we will never know , or one of us will be correct later
Bingo!
I don't know about deliberate, but it certainly crossed my mind.